Honda Failed to Report Defects’ Full Human Toll

Honda Motor, already facing rising scrutiny over its handling of defective airbags, grossly underreported to federal regulators the number of deaths and injury claims linked to possible defects in its vehicles for more than 10 years, the Japanese automaker disclosed on Monday.

An audit found that Honda did not report 1,729 written claims or notices on injuries or deaths from mid-2003 through mid-2014 — far more than the about 900 reports for that period that it did make.

The audit, commissioned by Honda and conducted by an outside law firm, was done several years after an employee noted the problem and regulators later raised the issue. The audit attributed the underreporting to inadvertent errors in data entry and coding, Honda said in a statement.

The admissions have the potential to bring millions in federal penalties and were made during a separate investigation by regulators of faulty airbags made by the Takata Corporation that Honda has linked to five deaths and dozens of injuries.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is planning a hearing on Dec. 3 to investigate the faulty airbags, a person briefed on the committee’s activities said.

Expected to testify are Takata’s senior vice president for global quality assurance, Hiroshi Shimizu, and David Friedman, deputy administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Both men testified last week in front of a Senate panel investigating the issue.

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Rick Schostek, a top executive at Honda North America, testified at a Senate hearing last week. He later said an audit identified “difficult facts about where we did not meet our obligations.”CreditT.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

The committee has also asked representatives from Toyota, BMW and Honda to testify, and may add witnesses soon.

Honda’s audit found that an employee first identified potential problems in the accuracy of Honda’s early-warning reporting in 2011. But “apparently, there was no follow-up,” Honda said in a statement.

And though federal regulators notified Honda of possible underreporting in early 2012, the automaker did not take action until September of this year.

Only in November did regulators, after receiving preliminary findings of the audit in October, issue a special order for Honda to submit more information on its early-warning reports.

That came after the Center for Auto Safety, a private advocacy group, wrote a public letter in October to federal safety regulators accusing Honda of systematically underreporting death and injury claims.

Under a system called Early Warning Reporting, automakers are required to disclose claims they receive that blame vehicle defects for serious injuries or deaths. The system was created under the Tread Act in 2000 after a wave of highway rollovers in Ford Explorers with Firestone tires. It was intended to give the auto safety agency better access to automakers’ accident data and more leverage over the auto industry.

“The audit identifies difficult facts about where we did not meet our obligations,” Rick Schostek, executive vice president of Honda North America, said on a conference call with reporters. “At Honda we acknowledge this problem as our management responsibility.” The audit was done by Bowman and Brooke, a Minneapolis law firm.

“Honda acknowledges that it lacked the urgency needed to correct its problems on a timely basis,” Mr. Schostek said.

Regulators this year have acted more aggressively in penalizing automakers that do not comply with federal reporting requirements.

Last month, safety regulators levied a $3.5 million penalty against Ferrari because it had not submitted reports of fatal accidents to the government. Ferrari also said that the omissions had been “inadvertent” and said the company had begun adopting new procedures to comply with reporting rules.

In May, the safety agency imposed a $35 million penalty, the maximum allowed, on General Motors for its failure to disclose a defective ignition switch in millions of older small cars in a timely manner. Lawmakers, calling the penalties insufficient, have introduced legislation that would substantially raise them.

In a statement, Kevin Vincent, auto safety agency’s chief counsel, said that it would immediately begin reviewing the documents as part of the other investigation into Honda’s handling of the airbag defects.

Mr. Schostek blamed “inadvertent data entry and computer programming errors” for the underreporting. In entering injury and death claims, Honda often did not enter a date, leading claims to be automatically omitted from its early reporting, he said.

Coding errors in a computer program that tracked incoming claims also led Honda to leave claims out of its reporting, he said. Even in cases where Honda received outside reports of a potential defect, like through a police report, it did not alert regulators, the automaker said.

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In the course of reporting, The Times obtained video showing the potentially dangerous consequences of mishandling Takata’s airbags. Millions of vehicles with the airbags have been recalled worldwide.Published OnNov. 6, 2014

A former lawyer for the agency said he was skeptical of Honda’s assertion that its errors were inadvertent.

“This is not an occasional error; this is systematic underreporting by the company,” said Allan J. Kam, now an auto safety consultant based in Bethesda, Md. “The effect of the underreporting is that the agency is less likely to investigate a Honda product,” he said.

Of Honda’s unfiled claims, eight were related to rupture-prone airbags made by Takata, Honda said. Automakers have warned that certain Takata-made airbags can deploy explosively and rupture in an accident, sending shrapnel flying toward the driver or passenger instead of protecting them.

But Honda used other channels to report those eight airbag-related claims — involving one fatality and seven injuries — to federal safety regulators, the automaker said.

For example, Honda did not file an early warning report on the death of Ashley Parham, who was killed on May 27, 2009, when the driver’s side airbag in her 2001 Accord exploded in an Oklahoma parking lot. But Honda said it separately notified safety regulators of that incident on Sept. 19, 2009.

The automaker said it had corrected its computer programming and coding flaws, and would expand its reporting of third-party documentation like police reports.

Honda also said it was retraining its workers on data entry methods, make organizational changes in departments responsible for its early warning reporting, and strengthen oversight of its reporting process.

Aaron M. Kessler and Danielle Ivory contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Honda Failed to Report Defects’ Full Human Toll. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe